Since I have been out in San Jose, I have taken up running several days per week. As such, my current shoes were not quite cutting it in terms of comfort, etc… So I ventured to the mall and ended up selecting these “Nike Air Max Rev +” shoes (I know, long name). Now the one thing I did not realize at the store, and that the sales rep failed to mention, was that these shoes support the Nike+ running system. What is that? Its this little accelerometer that you place in the bottom of the shoe and it sends data to your iPod nano. It is therefore aptly named “Nike+ Apple”

Now seeing as I did not have a nano (and have no intention of purchasing one). I kept searching on their site and found they offer this nifty SportBand that does essentially the same thing (collect speed, time, distance, etc…) without the need for forking over cash to Apple. (Its the “Nike+ Apple – Apple” system now)

After you run, you plug the SportBand to the computer and upload the data to NikePlus.com where you can set goals, track your progress, and make and accept challenges from other users. But why stop there. The Nike web site is not well suited for sharing your information with others, so I found a plugin for my Wordpress blog and have placed my most recent statistics on the right hand side of the pages. My first 3 runs were shorter, to be used for basic calibration (although I found that it was almost spot on whithout any need for calibration)

Hopefully having some fun gadgets involved in excercising will encourage me to keep it up the rest of the summer and into the fall as I return to school.